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Thirty five years.

That's how long Elizabethsonnett's family waited for justice to occur.

He backhanded is child.

I don't want the child had done.

You just don't do that to a child across its faith.

Thirty five long years.

And I entered the call, and I got all the information on who done it, who was all involved in all the particular.

The viciousness was there that he could do something like that.

I don't know who.

When Elizabeth Sennett was murdered, Patterson Hood, one of the lead singers of the legendary Southern rock band the Drive By Truckers, was living in the shoals.

Obviously, it was the big front page story for you know, weeks because it was such a horrific Grizzly murderer and all of the different As more details started coming out about it, you know, it just kept getting worse and worse.

He was twenty four working at a pharmacy in Florence, looking for a way out.

They closed the Ford Plant in nineteen eighty two, which was the year I graduated from high school.

And when it was gone, not only was it gone, but then all these other businesses it depended on people who made the money working at the Forward Plant.

That stuff started going.

It's really bounced back in the last last fifteen to twenty years.

The town's almost unrecognizable because of all the really positive things that have happened.

But in eighty eight it was pretty fucking grim.

Years went by, and the story of what happened to Elizabeth Senna stayed with him.

I don't know why it resonated with me, but I first started writing it thinking in terms of writing it more as like a short story or a book or something like that, and I kind of wrote it in that form, and then at some point started and turning it into a song.

The song was called The Fireplace Poker.

He released it on the album Go Go Boots, which came out in twenty eleven, maybe you've heard.

It before, God.

And answered, make it.

Right.

Pattison Hood got his inspiration from one of the regulars in that Florence drug store.

A local police officer told him back in nineteen eighty eight he was a.

Chief of police in Florence, and so he was all up in any police business anywhere in the area, whether it was in his jurisdiction or not.

So he would come in and just talk about stuff, and it was interesting to hear for sure.

He hearized really early on that it wasn't like it was like it was supposed to be looking like it was.

What everyone first thought was that Elizabeth Sennatt had been murdered by two local kids, Smith and John Force Parker.

They were the ones who drove out to Kondogs Cemetery Road on that March morning.

It was Parker's knife found in a pond behind the house.

They confessed.

They were charged with capital murder.

Everything that would happen in the Senate case over the course of the next thirty five years, the controversies, the outrage, the moral calamity that would ultimately take place in home and prison, was based on the assumption that the justice system in Alabama had correctly determined who was responsible for what happened that morning, namely, Charles Sennett was the mastermind who ordered the hit on his wife, and Parker and Smith were the killers.

But that's not what the Florence police chief told Patterson.

Hood found five was fall from grasp.

Still she.

Tried.

No one ever know what she told him, No way told her the rare and is biden fifteen wax fireplace poker.

The Reverend came home from work and found the missus dying.

Life was falling from her grasp, But still she lay there trying.

No one will ever know what she told him, or know what he told her, because the Reverend did his wife in fifteen whacks fireplace poker.

Wait, the Reverend did his.

Wife in.

My name is Malcolm Gladwell.

You're listening to my podcast about Things Overlooked and Misunderstood.

This episode of the Alabama Murders is about the trial of John Forest Parker, one of the three young men charged in the killing of Elizabeth Sennett, and all of the ways that the catastrophe that unfolded in the shoals the failure cascades set in motion by the murder could have been averted.

The counterfactual version of events, the what ifs episode three a peculiar institution.

I've had, you know, other cases that technically we're probably factually more complex, but this is, Yeah, this is the one that I will is still on my mind even without chilcoming.

Tom Hefflin was John Forrest Parker's attorney.

He remembers exactly where he was today Elizabeth Sennett was murdered.

I had been to Red Bay, Alabama, which is on the Mississippi border, down the same highway where this happened.

I may well have seen John Forrest Parker and Kenny Smith in their car.

I don't know that for a fact, but it might well add Then I got the call that the court was going to appoint me and Gene Handby to represent.

Heflin is the son of the former US Senator from Alabama, Howell Heflin.

In his living room, Heflin has a portrait of his famous father, and father and son looked very much alike.

The Heflins have large leonine heads and the kind of rumbling southern gravitas.

So you were quart appointed attorneys.

Quarter pointed attorneys?

Yeah?

Yeah, how much of your practice would have been that kind of work in those days.

Zero usual.

So how did it come about?

I think we'd had a string of capital murder cases, and you know, everybody kind of is expected to serve.

Parker's trial took place in May of nineteen eighty nine at the Cobra County Courthouse, a graceful white neoclassical building on the town square in the center of Tuscumbia.

All right, we're at the Copper County Courthouse.

If we look across, you see a three story building with a razor wire around it in a fence.

That's the county jail.

Heflin gave my colleague Ben Adaf Haffrey a tour of the courthouse.

We don't have full life.

The courtroom was small, gray and white.

On the wall, there's a portrait of the judge in the Parker case inga Johnson, long blonde hair, blue eyes.

So where did you guys there?

And so the jury box that's interesting, it sort of faces the judge food boxes there.

Witness would be there, Court Clark over there, obviously, judge court reporter here, like some of the jurors would have had like a direct view of John like from feet away.

Yeah, he would have been probably, we probably would have sat him there.

I think we did well inside where we blocked him off to a certain extent.

Why do you want to block him off, Well, he is shackled, you know, that's basically I just don't want to emphasize that he is a prisoner at that point, even everybody knows he is.

Most criminal trials, particularly older ones, don't have an audio or video record.

There's just a transcript created by the court reporter.

The transcripts can run for thousands of pages, and they're their own unique literary Because there's no description or elaboration or context.

They read us flat banal.

It takes a little bit of time to learn how to use your imagination to fill in the empty spaces.

And in the case of John Parker, what becomes clear when you learn how to fill in those empty spaces is that the prosecution's case was really, really weak.

The state's problem started with Parker sitting there in the docket a few feet from the jurors.

This was a case about a murder for hire, a contract killer, and he just didn't look the part of a contract killer.

Tell us about Parker.

Parker was like eighteen.

Actually a good family, solid people.

He had had some prior childhood trauma that I think probably created a little mittal.

He had some drug problems.

Tell me more about your impressions of him.

A kid who had been drugged out and didn't know what they were doing.

John Forest Parker had been arrested on multiple occasions for minor crimes, breaking into cars, stealing gas.

It failed ninth grade three times.

In one of his psychiatric evaluations done after one of his previous arrests, there's this quote.

John's childhood history includes a brain concussion at the age of two.

He reportedly was unconscious for thirty six hours following his concussion.

His parents reported that due to his brain concussion, they had not expected very much of John.

On the drive to Coondog Cemetery Road on the morning of Elizabeth sentence murder, Parker and Smith had a bottle of whiskey between them on the front seat.

Parker injected himself with a healthy dose of opioids.

On the way over, Charles Sennitt gave them some money to buy a gun.

They used it to buy drugs instead.

In every description of the crime, they come across as completely clueless.

Parker is nineteen, Smith twenty two.

They're so lackadaisical that after beating and stabbing Elizabeth Sennet, they threw the knife and the walking stick they used into the pond behind her house, when there are literally thousands of acres of wooded wilderness on the drive back home where something could be thrown away and it would never ever be found.

Yes, Parker and Smith heard Elizabeth Senne badly and took money to commit acts of violence.

But when we hear the phrase contract killers, we think of assassins, mafia hitman Stone called hard bitten lethal, These were screwed up kids.

One of the biggest points of weakness for the prosecution emerged d in the testimony of the surgeon who was on duty at Helen Keller Hospital when Elizabeth Senate was brought into the er, David Parkes McKinley.

He was the one who first saw her injuries, who tried to save her life, who pronounced her dead.

The direct examination by the prosecutor is brief and to the point.

The police had found a knife, a hunting knife, in the pond behind the Senate house.

This was a knife that both Smith and Parker admitted to bringing with them to Koondok Cemetery Road.

The prosecution just wanted to establish the connection between that knife and Elizabeth Sennett's death.

Question, doctor, can you tell us what you recall about her physical appearance?

Answer?

The most striking thing was a multiple stab wounds, particularly over the right side of the chest and at the base of the neck.

There were also some wounds of the forehead and scalp.

McKinney testified that the cuts on the forehead and scalp looked like they were from a blunt object.

The wounds to the chest and neck were caused by a knife.

He went on to say, it is likely that the chest wounds were by and large the cause of her death.

Prosecutor thank you doctor.

That's all halflin knew the prosecution was calling McKinley, so he did a little homework beforehand.

We're starting trial on the Tuesday following Memorial Day.

I know they're calling state medical examiner was coming up testify what the fate wounds were describing.

Then they were bringing the doctor who treated her in the emergency room there, and I called up the doctor and said, what are you going to say tomorrow?

And we talked about and visited kind knew each other.

What the doctor told him made Heflin realize he could lay a trap.

So in court, Hefflin gets up and a cross examination asks McKinley about the knife.

Question, have you ever been shown the knife that the state removed from the pond in this case?

Answer?

I have not seen it, no, sir.

Heflin turns to the prosecutors.

Do y'all have the knife?

This is one of those moments when the transcript is of little help.

You have to fill in the empty space.

The prosecutors are anxious.

They thought the identity of the murder weapon was a settled fact, So why does Hefflin want McKinley to see it?

They hesitate.

The judge immediately intervenes, Can I see y'all at the bench.

Both sides huddle with the judge.

The judge says to Hefflin, do you just want to show him the knife?

Hefflin says, uh huh.

The judge turns to the prosecutor, why don't you get it?

More hesitation from the prosecutors.

The judge repeats herself, y'all go get it.

The prosecutor's rummage in their evidence box, take it out.

Heflin hands it to the doctor.

I asked Heflin to read aloud from the trial transcripts from the crucial moment of his exchange with McKinley.

You saw the wounds inflicted on miss fresh when she came in host, didn't you, Yes, sir as said examining that knife, do you have any opinion whether or not that was the instrument that could have inflicted those wounds?

And McKinley answers, simply.

I would frankly be surprised this was the knife based on what I saw, or the sharp project based on what I saw on the patient.

I don't have any further questions.

The government's own witness testifies that the alleged murder weapon isn't actually the murder weapon.

The chest wounds are of a much smaller knife, Yes, that was.

The neck wounds are consistent with the large knife that Kenny and John have.

The chest wounds, which are the fatal wounds, seem to be made by a smaller knife, and we can't find the smaller knife.

That's right from there, you would think the reasonable doubts grow were Kenny Smith and John Parker actually the ones who stabbed Elizabeth Sennate to death.

The pathologist who conducted the autopsy on Elizabeth Sennett's body testifies she described sentence chess wounds as rapidly fatal.

When asked about this by prosecutors, she said bluntly, I don't think she lived very long after those wounds were inflicted.

Once again, one of the government's own witnesses undermines their case.

Think about the timing.

At eleven forty four in the morning, Charles Sennett calls Ronnie May in hysterics to report that his wife has been attacked.

At twelve fifteen, the paramedics discover that Elizabeth Senate has a pulse.

At one pm, she arrives at Helen Keller Hospital and she's still alive.

McKinley, in fact, doesn't pronounce her as dead until two five, a full hour later.

But according to the prosecution's own witness John Parker and Kenny Smith were back home in Florence by eleven thirty that morning.

It's a thirty to forty minute drive from Coondog Cemetery Road to Florence and it's pouring rain outside.

Timing doesn't work.

They must have left the Senate's house by at least eleven.

There's no way Parker and Smith could have inflicted rapidly fatal wounds at mid morning if she was still alive at two o'clock in the afternoon, meaning Smith and Parker must have been long gone by the time the fatal wounds were inflicted.

Later in the trial, another pathologist who had examined the Senate autopsy made the same point.

Here is heflin questioning him?

Question if the evidence in this case shows that the Cherokee Rescue squad detected a heartbeat on Missus Senate at approximately twelve to fifteen pm on March eighteen, nineteen eighty eight, Based upon your years of experience as a pathologist and your review of the exhibits that you just named, do you have an opinion as to what time prior to twelve fifteen pm the fatal wounds were delivered?

Answer within a very few minutes.

The judge, the jury, the lawyers on both sides, the journalists covering the trial are all listening to this testimony with its unmistakable implication someone else must have stabbed Elizabeth Sennett in the chest with a smaller knife, and who was the only person at the house at the time of the nine one one call Charles Sennet.

If Senate does it, the timing makes a lot more sense.

He shows up after they've left, Stabs calls Stabs and calls.

Yeah, or even had called and then yeah.

A knife that doesn't fit, a timeline that makes no sense.

And if the jury still had any lingering doubts about Charles Sennett's culpability.

There was also what they.

Heard from Elizabeth Sennett's friend who had a front row seat to the inner life of her marriage.

That's after the break.

Susan Moseley was a nurse at a weight loss clinic in Muscle Shoals.

Elizabeth Senate was one of her patients.

And I noticed she was extremely why introbility, no self staying.

What was a brilliant.

Moseley sat down with a local reporter named Lee Hedgebeth, who has written about the Senate case and did some interviews for us.

She shared with him what she remembered about Elizabeth in the months leading up to the murder.

So she would come once a we to the Planic and I would boil her.

I would weigh her to her blood pressure, talk to her about okay, how's your wait doing.

Mosey said that.

Elizabeth said it didn't seem happy.

She would sit in the waiting room with a napkin crushed in her fist.

One day, Mosey decided to confront her.

And I said, Liz, and listen to him.

You've been going up and down and wait.

So I'm going to close this chart and I'm just gonna turn it down.

Lunch shut miles, puggade bread and how about you he close your eyes and just tell me what you think.

It's the biggest problem.

If you eat coctato, ships will holly we every night we'll get baked one.

So we will do something to just let me know.

And I never need no bus.

And I had the chair Russell and I still every shovel and she said I need a dope.

Open your eyes, she said, turn around here, and I'll never forget.

I've turned to my lap if the lamb walked this, and she was standing there, and I'm gonna tell you before we go any puddle, I'm gonna shit.

I've gone to Barls p whaty bells pub about an inch.

Bute book.

Well, sure sleep would come.

All in the chest.

Pap he thought her butts and legs to a certain area where a skirt would.

Come the black.

Black the Senate was covered and bruises.

I got up and have this whole boy.

I didn't ask no questions.

I didn't ask anything.

I had to butt a little thing back up and now one like that.

She said, down, you won't talk about this, and she began to kill me.

This story about her relationship.

With mister sid.

She began to kill me, but she was didn't know how, but that he was going.

To kill her, and that she knew this, and she had saved them her money for the bulls, and when we were able to attorney, she was going to do this.

One charge her four hundred dollars.

She said, I worried about this and worried about this.

Once I'll do there, she said, I know, I don't think they've all ever be three with me with before who kills me.

She didn't know how, but he was going to kill her, and she didn't think she could break free.

Mosey said she tried to help Elizabeth to find a way to leave Charles, leave the marriage.

She told Elizabeth, you can come and live with me if you want.

She tried to help her find the words to communicate to her husband.

It had to end.

We would say turn Alan literally right off the wood thing and say okay, now say say this Charles, we need to talk.

I cannot continue to be alone with all these Ltons.

And they go to children lady and taught a pego fathers where long's lay shirt a degree there.

Somebody is going to dig this out.

Is Mosley gave a deposition to investigators, and her testimony was recounted to the jury by Ronnie May from the Colbert County Sheriff's office in the flat, effectless tone of official speak.

But even then, it's impossible to miss the power of what she saw.

Listen, this is what May said.

Missus Moseley said that she had been told by Missus Senatet that around Christmas of that year, Charles's family came to visit and they had come up from Florida.

Missus Sennett stated that some of the family went hunting.

She stated that Charles became extremely upset over some conversation between he and members of the family, and Missus Sennett stated that during that outburst of Christmas with his family members, he laid down on the floor and screamed and cried and seemed to be paralyzed at different times.

Missus Sennett stated that this went on for some time at the house, and as a result, Charles's family left and returned to Florida.

Missus Moseley stated that Missus Senate told her during this argument that Charles at one point had pulled and waved a gun in the direction of his father.

On one of my visits to the Shoals, I sat in Tom Hefflin's living room and tried to make sense of all the things that Jerry learned about Charles Sennet, who had taken his own life so quickly after his wife's murder.

I mean, of all of these three potential murderers, Parker Smith and Senate Senate is the only one with a documented history of violent, highly aggressive behavior.

He's the one who beat his wife.

To me, this is all about Charles Sennett, the whole thing.

He sets the whole thing in motion.

He's the charismatic, persuasive adult.

He's a predator.

He really should be the one on trial.

And without having gone back, maybe we didn't try him hard enough.

This, I think is what was on the police chief's mind when he gossiped about the case with patterson Hood, lead singer at the drive by truckers at that drug store in Florence.

I can't remember how thing they figured out that he that, you know, the preacher had finished the job and all that, but it was, you know, it was pretty obvious, pretty quick.

You know that those guys, they were fuck ups.

They took what was going to be a simple go in, you know, kill her, make it look like a robbery, and turned it into this gruesome thing.

And she was still alive, and so the preacher did what you know, be then did?

I mean's god, It's just it's just such an awful story on every imaginable level, which.

Is why patterson Hood wrote the crucial verse, very.

Home word found misus die My was fall from her grasp still she tried.

No one ever knows what she told him.

Nobody told her it's the river and is my friend fifteen blacks Fireplace Poker.

To read the John Parker trial transcript with the full knowledge of what would happen over the following decades is to get angry, especially after what happened next the sentencing.

What was it like when you were sequestered?

We spent eight days over here in the Ramada end.

Gary Highfield, foreman of the jury in the Parker trial, talking to my colleague Ben the daph Haffrey.

It was good.

I mean, you know, they fed us, and I mean we got to go home and get clothes and all that kind of stuff and then you know, go down there.

But uh, they told us prepare for clothes for a week, and we got them and you know, went to the hotel.

I mean it was all good.

Did you guys hang out when you were.

We really they told us not to, you know, we just kind of We did get to go to the pool.

We did go to the pool one day.

Highfield was thirty years old, time married one kid and another on the way sold insurance.

He says looking back that the news coverage of the killing made the job of the defense very difficult.

I think it kind of handcuffed then because people had an idea of what had happened.

There was so much put out there beforehand.

And it's when you get something, When a person gets something in their mind, you know, it's kind of hard to change.

So when they heard all of the discrepancies about the timing and the weapon and the character of Charles Sennett.

It was hard for them to square that with their understanding of John Parker.

He had agreed to go out to Kundak Cemetery Road, he had admitted he brutally assaulted Elizabeth Sennate.

A dispassionate reading of the child transcripts today years later supports the idea that Parker should have been acquitted of the murder charge, just gotten something like conspiracy to commit murder or assault in the first degree.

But this was a year after the crime, and it was very hard to be dispassionate.

But I mean, look, in that kind of situation, if you had he he meant to kill her with that pipe.

I mean, if you mean to do something, you may not actually be the one that committed the death, the actual death, but torturing somebody that bad was.

Man, it was awful.

Dude.

If you if you're not, even if you're not the one that taught that was the one that fatally killed her, you did you.

I mean, it was proven that you did every bit of that stuff.

This lady.

I mean, she might as well have been dead.

But anyway, I don't know, it's just I mean, I I don't even like to think about it too much.

I don't know which one of them killed her.

I really don't, but I think both of them got what they probably deserved.

Lee legally and Moraley.

They found Parker guilty of murder, so Parker's attorney, Tom Heiffeland lost that round, but the prosecution was asking for the death penalty, and here the jury hesitated.

The picture that Hefflin had painted up his client as a mixed up kid in over his head had left an impression.

So the jury voted overwhelmingly ten to two for life without parole.

The jury didn't think Parker deserved to die.

I just don't think some of these people that were on the jury, they didn't want that to be on their conscious the rest of their life.

Putting somebody into the death penalty.

At this point, the cascade could have stopped right.

A cascade is unique as a category of catastrophe because it requires multiple stages in sequence.

Remember our proverb from episode one, you need to nail the shoe, the horse, the rider, the message, and the battle for the kingdom to be imperiled.

And if any of those stages fall out along the way, if the rider loses his horse but quickly finds another The kingdom is fine.

A life sentence for Parker brings the whole saga to a close, because it means that Kenny Smith would almost certainly get a life sentence as well when his time came, and for all intents and purposes, the case would be closed.

Justice would be served.

The rider found another horse.

The kingdom is just fine.

Except that's not what happens why, Because this is Alabama.

To understand what happens next requires a brief digression into an obscure legal doctrine known as judicial override.

Judicial override arose in the mid nineteen seventies in response to the Supreme Court's insistence that states be more rigorous in the way they use the death penalty.

The court wanteds standards rules, so the court divided capital cases into two stages.

First, a jury was required to rule on the defendant's guilt.

Then, the Supreme Court said it wanted juris to do something they don't do in normal criminal cases, decide on the appropriate sentence.

Alabama's response was to pass the law giving the final word to the judge, and if the judge wanted to override the jury's decision to turn say life for the parole into the death penalty, they could.

A handful of states did something similar, like Florida, but in Florida the law said that the judge had to give quote great weight to the jury's decision.

In Alabama, a judge could do whatever they wanted, and over the next forty years, judges did just that.

The override was used over one hundred times in Alabama, almost always to allow a judge to execute someone whose life the jury wanted to save, with judges saying all kinds of crazy things along the way, like the time an Alabama jury went easy on a murderer because he was mentally disabled, and the judge overrode them because and unquoting the sociological literature suggests gypsies intentionally test low on standard IQ tests.

So in the Parker trial, the jury rules in the first stage that he's guilty, and in the sentencing stage they say no death penalty, life without parole.

And what happens next.

The judge Nka Johnson, the one with a portrait on the wall in the courtroom, overrides the jury recommendation and sentences Parker to death.

Heflin was not exactly surprised when you heard her override decision.

Your reaction was you saw it coming coming?

Yeah?

Do you did she think she?

I think she.

I think she now she's generally a good judge.

I think she listened.

I think she a you know, I'm not saying she had totally prejudged it, but I think she.

Damn it.

She doesn't give in her sentencing decision.

She doesn't really give specific reasons as to why she's overriding the Jerry's recommendation.

In Alabama, you're not required to.

The whole thing makes no sense, of course, if the Supreme Court wanted the states to make the application of the death penalty less arbitrary, how does just handing over power to judges to do whatever they want for whatever random reason fix the problem.

Gary Highfield, the jury foreman, is still angry about it.

What reason did I have to spend a week over a week in a jury listening to this when she has the right to overturn my decision or decision?

I mean, I felt like there was no reason for May to even be there.

That's the problem I have with That's the only problem I have with the whole thing, don't I mean?

I just felt I felt useless spending all that time on a jury, and then she has the right to come back.

I mean, there's no sense even having a jury if you're going to be able to overturn the jury, if a judge can overternal jury.

Parker gets sent to death row at Donaldson Prison in Bessemer, Alabama, just outside of Birmingham.

This is nineteen eighty nine.

His lawyers keep him alive, filing appeal.

After appeal, thirteen years pass, he's still alive and he gets one final chance by way of a new Supreme Court case.

In ring the Arizona the court throws out Arizona's practice of allowing judges to make sentencing decisions independently of the jury in death penalty cases.

They said it violates the sixth Amendment, which reads, in case you've forgotten, in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury.

If your life is at stake, then what happens to you shouldn't be left up to the whims of whatever judge you were assigned.

Only a jury should be allowed to make the call of life or death, and that protection is right there in the constitution.

In response, Indiana, which had an override statute on its books, shuts it down.

Everyone on death row in Indiana who was there because of a judge's override gets their original life sentence back.

All eyes turned to Alabama.

Surely they have to follow suit, right, John Parker's going to live.

When I heard that it was done as John's come, my faithing was John was off death row.

This was two thousand and two.

For the next eight years, Parker got up every morning waiting for the state of Alabama to acknowledge the fact that the law that put him on death row was unconstitutional.

He waits and waits.

Do you know when Alabama finally got around to abolishing judicial override twenty seventeen, when it was too late to make any difference for Parker.

In fact, it took Alabama forty one years to come to their senses, and then they couldn't help themselves.

They say this reversal only applies to future cases.

Anyone who's already on death row because of a judge's override in the previous forty two years stays on death row.

In the years before the Civil War, there was a phrase Southern slave owners would use to describe their practice of owning their workforce.

They called it their peculiar institution.

Euphemism a nice way of saying that things were done a little differently in their part of the world.

Judicial override is, I think, a very good example of another Alabama peculiarity.

And if you are at all curious about how this particular peculiarity works, I would direct you to the discussion that took place on April seventeenth, twenty twenty four, in a hearing room at the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery.

Helus.

Gentlemen, I want to welcome you to the House Judiciary Committee.

We're glad to have each and every one of you here with us today.

Thank Misterior member.

Mister England, you want to talk about twenty seven.

Absolutely, Representative England is Chris England, that rarest of species in Alabama.

A Democrat represents Tuscaloosa.

He was the co sponsor of the legislation back in twenty seventeen that ended judicial override.

Now he wants to make an amendment to that law, House Bill twenty seven.

What this bill does or seeks to do, is to make that application retroactive, so that I believe thirty three individuals that are currently sitting on death row as a result of override could be resentenced.

Representative England says, we've all finally agreed that judicial override violates the constitutional right to a jury trial in death Bendley cases.

So we should go back and restore the's decision in the case of all those people who are only on death row, because it took us forty years to realize that back in nineteen seventy five, we made a big mistake.

Mister England.

I hear what you're saying, and I understand that an individual tride today would be would be subject to a different set of laws, and I've got you.

But the individuals that were shod part of the time we changed the law were subject to those laws that were in effect at that time, and the law that was in effect at that time allowed judicial override, and these judges and their discretion overrode.

Then comes this priceless bit of nonsense.

God squarely, it's very difficult for me to second yes or an effect override that which the judge overwrote.

At this there are lots of nods up and down the committee This is the Alabama peculiarity.

I have Southern friends who get mad correctly at the way Northerners always bring up slavery or get all worked up because people drive around with Confederate flags.

But come on, this isn't a random thing.

This is a characteristic.

There is something in the psyche of places like Alabama that really, really, really doesn't want to address the consequences of past moral failures.

Hi, is there is there a motion to give this bill a favorable report?

Thank you?

In a second.

Okay, we've had plenty of discussion.

You asked for a rogue.

I'll go ahead, Brandy.

Maybe you see where this is going.

They vote it down, there will be no overriding of the override.

It seems really clear to me that John Forest Parker didn't kill Elizabeth Sennett.

He was back home in Florence when she received the stab wounds that killed her.

He should never been convicted of murder, but he was.

And if he was going to be convicted, he should have served out the sentence given to him by a jury of his peers without parole.

But he didn't.

And once he was on death row, Alabama should have ended the practice that robbed him of a just result, but they didn't get around to it for over forty years, and even then they couldn't bring themselves to override the override.

John Forrest Parker never stood a chance next time on the Alabama murders.

This is how lethal injection actually kills you.

It kills you by burning your lungs up.

So the last thing that you know, you may know, is that you're on fire from the inside and the blood is filling up your lungs as you die.

Is this too graphic?

He Look, if you come back here and start coming and these guys ask you to go all the way with them, you gotta be willing to go.

And I said, what's all the way?

And he said, you know, if they're executions and if they ask you to be with them, you need you can't.

You need to be willing to go, and if you're not, just don't come.

Revision's History is produced by ben Da dapfh Haffrey, Lucy Sullivan, and Nina Bird Lawrence.

Additional reporting by ben Da Dafh Haffrey, and Lee Hedgsbeth.

Our editor is Karen Schakerji.

Fact checking by Kate Ferby.

Our Executive producer is Jacob Smith.

Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence, Production support from Luke LeMond.

Original scoring by Luis Garra with Paul Brainard and Jimmy Bodd.

Sound design and additional music by Jake Gorsky.

H'm Malcolm Glabam